Building a life-size car from scratch, with no instructions, using nothing but cardboard, rope and raw creativity — it sounds impossible. Yet that’s exactly what the team at Tgreen Energia pulled off in the heart of the Brescia countryside. Thirty people, a centuries-old stone castle as their backdrop, a basic kit and one simple rule: get to the finish line, on four wheels, before everyone else. Welcome to Cartoon Car Race, one of the most exciting and creative formats in our catalogue of 130+ team building activities.
The Challenge: Build Without a Blueprint
The real difficulty of the Cartoon Car Race isn’t the race itself — it’s everything that comes before it. Each team receives a starter kit made of wooden elements, rope and cardboard, but no instructions for assembling the frame. No diagrams, no templates, no reference model to follow. Just the group’s collective intelligence, the ability to assign roles on the fly and the pressure of a ticking clock.
This is where the most revealing team dynamics emerge: who takes initiative, who coordinates, who builds, who comes up with creative solutions when things don’t quite fit. It’s pure problem solving wrapped in a layer of fun. Think of it as the organised chaos of delivering a project under deadline — except this time, the project races on four wheels.
The Race: Speed, Aesthetics and a Few Too Many Corners
Once built, the cars are painted and personalised by the team. Visual identity is part of the competition: during the race, teams are scored on both speed and aesthetics — two criteria that reflect the two souls of any great team: the one that wants to win, and the one that wants to impress.
The race itself is a push-race through the castle grounds, amid cheering, corners taken with far more enthusiasm than technique, and the genuine excitement of people who have worked hard to bring their cardboard vehicle to life. The outcome of the Tgreen Energia event? Three cars built, three teams in the race, one winner — and a shared memory that no slide deck could ever create.
Why It Works: Team Building That Doesn’t Feel Like Team Building
Cartoon Car Race works precisely because it doesn’t look like a training session. There are no slides, no role-play exercises, no one explaining what “effective communication” means in theory. There is a concrete problem to solve — build something that actually works — and a group of people who must find the solution together, under pressure, with limited resources.
The skills activated during the activity are the same ones that matter every day at the office: planning, delegation, active listening, rapid adaptation to the unexpected. But in an experiential setting, these skills are developed without participants even realising it. This is the philosophy that has guided our formats for over 22 years in the industry.
The format suits all corporate departments and is especially effective for creative teams or groups looking to strengthen internal cohesion in an unconventional way. It scales naturally from medium-sized groups to larger corporate events.
How to Organise Cartoon Car Race for Your Company
The format works best in open-air locations: parks, villas, castles, corporate green spaces. For the Tgreen Energia event, the choice of a stone castle in the Brescia area added a cinematic quality that elevated the whole experience. The right venue isn’t just a backdrop — it’s part of the event itself.
TeamBuilding.it operates from its headquarters in Rome and Milan and runs activities across Italy. We work with companies of all sizes and sectors, tailoring every format to the client’s specific goals — whether that’s cohesion, leadership, communication or simply giving the team a day they’ll talk about for months.
If you’d like to bring Cartoon Car Race to your company, or if you’re looking for the right format among our 130+ options, get in touch here and let’s build the perfect event for your team.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many people can take part in the Cartoon Car Race? The format works from around twenty participants upwards. It scales easily to larger groups simply by increasing the number of teams and cars in the race.
Do participants need any technical or hands-on experience? Not at all. The kit is designed to be accessible to everyone, regardless of practical background. In fact, the most creative teams are often those who don’t get held back by overly technical thinking.
How long does the activity last? The typical duration ranges from 3 to 4 hours, including the build phase, the aesthetic personalisation and the final race. Timing can be adjusted to fit the broader event schedule.
Is Cartoon Car Race suitable for mixed or cross-generational teams? Absolutely — and that’s one of the format’s biggest strengths. The combination of different skills — technical, creative, organisational — encourages collaboration across very different profiles, making it particularly effective when people don’t know each other well yet.
To protect participants’ privacy, the images were recreated with AI based on real events.
